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Legends of the Wall Take a Great Fall

As every Beijing schoolboy knows from the big bumper book of facts about the Great Wall, there are two things beyond question:

1. The Great Wall is the only “man-made” object visible from the Moon, or outer space, or something;

2. The Great Wall is 10,000 li, or 5,000 kilometres long.

Over the past three years, both of these unassailable facts have been assailed. The first appears to have been largely discredited by–of all people–China’s first astronaut (taikong yuhangyuan).

During China’s first manned spaceflight in 2003, Col. Yang Liwei, said he didn’t see the Great Wall while in orbit, triggering a debate in China over whether school textbooks should be corrected. You might think Yang’s matter-of-fact observation would have ended the matter, but cultural custodians seldom take things like this lying down.

A senior Chinese cultural heritage official last month expressed the hope that future Chinese astronauts would see things differently and bring back some photos of the Wall.

“There is still no definite evidence to prove whether the Great Wall is visible from space,” the vice-director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, Tong Mingkang, said while answering questions of netizens online at a Chinese Government Web site.

The Chinese-American astronaut Leroy Chiao saw it, according to the official China Daily. Chiao himself said he wasn’t too sure what he had photographed, but arguably one of the world’s stupidest debates is still not settled in some people’s eyes.

The second “fact,” well “let’s just say if the massive new survey recently announced by Chinese officials finds the Great Wall any shorter than 10,000 li, the sky may very well fall on our heads.

“The Wall has been consistently misunderstood since the first Europeans saw it,” says William Lindesay, author of Alone on the Great Wall and director of International Friends of the Great Wall. He blames it all on Chinese whispers, more precisely 500 years of mistranslation of the word “wan,” literally “10,000” in Chinese. “You shouldn’t take these terms literally,”says Beijing-based Lindesay. “People here used to say ‘10,000 years of life to Chairman Mao!’ That’s why I translate the ‘10,000-li wall’ as ‘the endless wall’.”

Other experts, mostly Britons, won’t let a little thing like language get in the way of a tape measure. It has been reported the Great Wall contains more masonry than the sum of Britain’s buildings and that, if dismantled and laid end-to-end, the Great Wall would circle the equator two-and-a-half times. It wasn’t until July 20, 1969, that Neil Armstrong made “one small step for man and one great leap forward” for truth about the Wall: No can see, said the man on the moon.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean said, “The only thing you can see from the moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white (clouds), some blue (ocean), patches of yellow (deserts), and every once in a while some green vegetation.” “No man-made object is visible on this scale. In fact, when first leaving earth’s orbit and when only a few thousand miles away, no man-made object is visible at that point either.”

This minor factual setback did not prevent patriots modifying the claim: the Wall was not the only man-made object visible from the moon, they said, but from space: a low-Earth orbit such as the one travelled by the US Space Shuttle (roughly 250–600 kilometres above the Earth).

There appear to be only three problems with this modified theory:

1) NASA’s Earth from Space photographic archive shows pictures taken from low-Earth orbit of man-made structures, including highways, airports, bridges, dams and components of the Kennedy Space Center.

2) While these objects are visible, the Great Wall is barely discernable, if not invisible. “We looked for the Great Wall of China,” said Shuttle astronaut Jay Apt. “Although we could see things as small as airport runways, the Great Wall seems to be made largely of materials that have the same colour as the surrounding soil.

Despite persistent stories that it can be seen from as far as away as the Moon, the Great Wall appears almost invisible from 180 miles up.

“To us it’s a bit ironic that for years people believed you could see the Great Wall from the Moon,” says Brendan Fletcher, who is hiking the entire length of the world’s longest man-made structure with wife Emma Nicholas. “We usually have a hard time finding it from half a mile away.”

In fact, today’s Wall is fast disappearing. “It’s under attack from man and nature,” said Dong Yaohui, vice-president of the China Great Wall Society, a non-governmental organization devoted to the research, preservation and development of the Great Wall.

“Some parts of the Wall I saw in the 1980s are simply not there; they don’t exist anymore.”

The Chinese Government has issued a regulation which bans defacing and driving on the Great Wall or taking bricks from it or building on it. Based on his own 1984–85, 508-day walk, Dong estimates that the length of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall, not including parts of the Wall built during the Qin, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, is “now only about 2,500 kilometres.”

The deputy director-general of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, disputes that. “There is no authoritative figure for the Great Wall,” Tong Mingkang told People’s Daily. “All the figures we’ve got were measured by walking and are unscientific. They’re not trustworthy.”

Hence the announcement on Friday that Tong’s employers and the Bureau of Surveying and Mapping plan to settle the whole issue once and for all, using math, by 2008.

“The Great Wall really is endless,” says Lindesay. “When I got to the end of my walk, I realized it wasn’t really the end. A journey on the Wall can never be finished, only abandoned.”

All that might change next year. And if surveyors add in demolished parts of the Wall like that found in Jiangjiakou in Hebei, or include some of the countless invisible “Great Wall” spurs built in previous dynasties, there’s still hope for the “10,000 li” figure.

“Before 1984, everyone said that the Great Wall in Beijing was 200–300 kilometres long,” explains Dong. “But after we checked it from overhead it was found to be 629 kilometres long; so it’s hard to say what the true length will be after the survey is finished.”